How PTI candidates campaigned with many hiding or serving jail

The independent candidates backed by former Prime Minister Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) are forging ahead as the results of Pakistan's National Assembly election began pouring in a day after the polling.

The lead of PTI-backed candidates made global headlines, despite the party founder being jailed and barred from running for office, and many of the party's candidates facing imprisonment or evading capture.

They encountered a major setback when the Pakistan Election Commission stripped the party of their electoral symbol - the cricket bat - a crucial feature for contesting elections, particularly in a country like Pakistan where 42% of the 231 million population are illiterate. Despite these challenges, PTI-backed candidates are leveraging technology for their election campaigns.

Atif Khan, a former provincial minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the north of Pakistan, has been on the run since May. As part of his campaign strategy, he now appears on video broadcasts displayed on three-meter screens driven around his constituency by his team, stopping at town squares to address PTI supporters, as reported by the BBC.

Atif said, "The largest support base of PTI is the young voter demographic. They are avid users of digital media and mobile phones, which is why we decided to engage more with them through these platforms. Campaigning through digital media is our only viable option."

The party's official websites, Instagram, and TikTok pages each boast several million followers, surpassing the combined numbers of the other two main parties - the PPP and PML-N. Efforts have also been made to utilize technology to inform voters about PTI-backed candidates. In the absence of the unifying image of the cricket bat, PTI has developed a website where voters can input their constituency and discover their PTI-backed candidate's symbol.

Additionally, the party has organised virtual rallies.

"It's cost-effective, safe, and efficient," said Jibran Ilyas, head of PTI social media, speaking to the BBC from his base in Chicago. "While it may lack the impact of physical rallies, we are committed to disseminating our message."

Ilyas acknowledged the challenge of holding political rallies without Imran Khan's presence, stating, "People yearn for Imran Khan's message." To address this, in December, the party utilized AI to generate a speech for an online rally.

However, there are limitations. According to the internet monitoring group Netblocks, there were nationwide disruptions across different platforms in Pakistan on several occasions that coincided with some of these PTI rallies.